1.6万个恐龙脚印？玻利维亚发现全球最密集脚印区

Then scientists came here in the 1960s and dispelled children’s fears, determining that the strange footprints in fact belonged to gigantic, two-legged dinosaurs that stomped and splashed over 60 million years ago, in the ancient waterways of what is now Toro Toro, a village and popular national park in the Bolivian Andes.

Now, a team of paleontologists, mostly from California’s Loma Linda University, have discovered and meticulously documented 16, 600 such footprints left by theropods, the dinosaur group that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Their study, based on six years of regular field visits and published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, reports that this finding represents the highest number of theropod footprints recorded anywhere in the world.

“There’s no place in the world where you have such a big abundance of (theropod) footprints, “ said Roberto Biaggi, a co-author of the study led by Spanish paleontologist Raúl Esperante.

The dinosaurs that ruled the earth and roamed this region also made awkward attempts to swim here, according to the study, scratching at what was squishy lake-bottom sediment to leave another 1, 378 traces.

“This is a remarkable window into the lives and behaviors of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, “ said Richard Butler, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham.

Although they’ve survived for millions of years, human life has threatened these traces.

For decades, farmers threshed corn and wheat on the footprint-covered plateaus.

Nearby quarry workers didn’t think much of the formations as they blasted rock layers for limestone.

The reason dinosaurs flocked in droves to this wind-swept plateau remains a mystery.

But what’s certain is that research into this treasure trove of a dinosaur tracksite will continue.